There is little in the report that wasn’t already known. Whatever drama emerged was an exercise in squeezing blood from an overripe turnip. The whole report release process – an elaborate briefing in person of an embargoed text with no access to phones or laptops on the morning of Thursday the 27th - was moot. Print copies were already in bookstores on Wednesday and the New York Times and Bloomberg had it earlier. They were putting out copy by early Wednesday.

Most of the reporting reminds me of that Woody Allen joke: "I took a speed reading course and read 'War and Peace' in twenty minutes. It’s about Russia.”

I followed the Commissions proceedings closely and encouraged its goals as stated: “To examine the causes of the current financial and economic crisis in the United States.”

….I asked Tucker Warren, spokesperson for the FCIC, when or if any of the audit firms would testify before the Commission on the causes of the financial crisis.

Warren told me that much of the Commission’s work goes on behind the scenes, almost 7/8ths, like the proportion of a typical iceberg actually under the surface. Rest assured, he assured me, the Commission was receiving input from all relevant parties, whether we saw them testify during public hearings or not. On the direct question of whether the audit firms had given private testimony Mr. Warren would not comment.

I asked Warren why the names of the PwC partners had been redacted in several of the documents recently posted to their site regarding AIG. After checking with the Commission’s legal counsel, Mr. Warren told me that individual auditors’ names had been redacted because PwC had asked the Commission to obscure them.

The Commission had considered PwC’s request in light of whether redaction would change the truthfulness of the documents or inhibit the illumination of the issues that are their primary mandate. The Commission also considered whether it was appropriate to subject “innocent” parties to public scrutiny if they were not central to the investigation.

The final FCIC report contains minimal mention of the audit firms. In fact, when someone asked during the FCIC's press conference on the 27th, "What was the auditor's role in the crisis?", the speaker directed the heckler to the New York Attorney General's office. It’s clear to me that the Commission either believes the auditors were innocent parties or chooses to characterize them as such for expediency’s sake.

There is evidence of only one interview with a Big 4 partner, Tim Ryan of PwC regarding AIG. The fruits of that interview seem to be only a “CYA” statement referring to AIGFP Cassano’s statements to PwC in September 2007 regarding the "remote " nature of any defaults from the super senior CDS portfolio.

There is no evidence of any other interviews with audit firm leadership or audit engagement partners for the failed institutions.

PricewaterhouseCoopers is included in the discussions of AIG’s problems and the AIG and Goldman Sachs collateral dispute but these stories have already appeared in detail elsewhere. The report describes PwC’s final determination that a “material weakness” in internal controls must be reported as of December 31, 2007 regarding the valuations process for the super senior CDS portfolio and that write-down estimates reported at the December 2007 investor meeting were wrong.

There is some editorializing:

Why the auditors waited so long to make this pronouncement is unclear, particularly given that PwC had known about the adjustment in November.

But there is no evidence that anyone from PwC was ever asked why it took so long to push AIG to recognize the write downs or an even more important question:

How could PwC allow two of their most important audit clients - AIG and Goldman Sachs – to assign such wildly different values to the same assets for more than a year including reporting these different values on their respective balance sheets included in multiple 10-Qs and 10-Ks?

No inquiry was made of Ernst & Young or the other firms about use of the Repo 105 technique by their other clients, in spite of revelations in the report that "window-dressing" transactions occurred at Bear Stearns, a Deloitte audit client. The report says Bear Stearns also treated quarter end repurchase transactions as “sales”, a reference to Lehman’s Repo 105 accounting loophole. But no one from Deloitte is asked about this despite the fact Deloitte is a defendant in class action lawsuits for having done “no audit at all” at Bear Stearns. Deloitte’s name appears only once in the report, in a footnote, referring to losses at another client IKP whose Rhineland SIV was one of the first big casualties of the run on asset-backed commercial paper in 2007.

The FCIC report may have been the last chance for a Congressional Panel to question the auditors in the same way that the House of Lords recently questioned the leaders of the Big 4 in the UK. That inquiry led to the startling revelation, according the auditors, that secret conversations took place between audit leadership and government officials, at the auditors' request, to resolve their concerns about “going concern” qualifications for the banks' 2008 annual reports. Lord Myners has since refuted their contention that he gave them any such assurances.